Are all these emergency room visits necessary?

When Alies Maybee’s abdominal pain became so severe she started weeping, her first instinct was to call her family doctor.

But when she called, all she heard was an automated voice message. It told her to go to the emergency room.

“It was a bit discouraging but the pain was so bad I just wanted to have some kind of relief,” said the 66-year-old Torontonian. “I don’t like to go to the emergency department unless I absolutely have to.”

Across Canada, nearly one in five patients who visited an emergency room did so for conditions that could have been treated by a family physician or at a clinic, according to a new report from the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI).

Of the 7 million cases analyzed, 1.4 million could have been better treated at a family practice or clinic, the study found. There were about 17 million visits to emergency departments in Canada from April 2013 to March 2014, according to the institute.

To me, the most important system issue is people’s access to family physicians.